Engine Summer Part 6

"Well," said one of them, "I suppose, if you want to. But we brought you here. Do you know how to get back?"

With a sudden decision that startled me as much as I hoped it would startle them, I said: "I'm not coming back." I'm not coming back, twins, so go chase your gra.s.shoppers. "I guess I'll just stay here, and wait for him, and stay and live with him, and I guess be a saint."

The twins thought about that for a while, sitting down again and looking from me into the woods and at each other. Then Budding came and gravely kissed my cheek; and Blooming took the cue and kissed the other cheek. They brought my pack to me from where I had left it at the pasture's edge and put it by me. And without another word they turned back to the brook and disappeared in the aspens at its edge.

One thing about Leaf cord, they're very down to earth, but if an occasion comes up, they'll rise to it.

Evening gathered as I sat, and a stack of new midges danced in the still air of the little pasture. The more I thought about my decision the more sensible it seemed to me; but the more I thought how sensible it was, the less I felt like getting up and going into the woods that breathed at the edge of the pasture to look for the saint.

I practiced what I would say in apology to him - no more than "h.e.l.lo there" or the like, but I practiced till I felt it had enough weight to be convincing. (You practice just by meaning it harder.) But in the end, what got me into the woods were the twins' kisses burning on my cheeks, and the thought of how I would feel if I went back - if, that is, I could find my way back at all. Of course they're Leaf cord, it wouldn't matter to them, they'd just be glad to see me - and somehow that made it worse.

So I got up in the growing gloom and went into the woods, quietly so as not to disturb him should he be around. It was almost dark already in the woods, and grew darker as I went deeper in, and a breeze whispered and creaked in it warningly, and soon it was impossible to take steps without tripping. I had come on an enormous old oak as wide as a wall, which it seemed the woods must have started with, and sat down amid its sheltering roots.

Too dark now to string my hammock, but there was a star caught in the web of leaves, and the air was still; I could spend this night here. It was no good thinking of the water house, or of Belaire, if I wanted to be a saint as much as I said, but it was hard not to think of them as I sat with knees drawn up. I rolled some smoke, carefully picking up the crumbs I dropped. I had enough for several days, and there were always roots and berries that Seven Hands had taught me about, though there would be no berries ripe yet; and if I really got hungry I could kill some little animal and toast it over a fire and eat the meat, as they did in ancient times. And, I thought, if he's a real saint, he won't let me starve to death, right in his own woods.

And if I did starve: perhaps something like that was what was in store for me. It would be sad, but maybe in future times people would learn from it; perhaps I would become a part of this saint's story, and so never die - was that what Painted Red had meant? I thought of Once a Day, and how she might someday come to hear the story; she would know, then - know something. I sat and looked at the blue glimpses of heaven revealed by the moving leaves and thought about being dead.

"If you're going to sit there all night," said a small voice over my head, "you might go and get me some water." I jumped back from the dead and looked upward into the darkness. I could just make out the whiteness of his beard in the dark leaves of the oak I had been leaning on. I couldn't remember what it was I had planned to say. The beard disappeared, and a dark object was thrown at me, and I ducked as it clattered near me. It was a plastic bucket. I stood holding it and staring up at the tree.

"Well?" said the small voice.

I picked my way out of the woods and down the hill, and filled the bucket from the black water of the brook, and came back with it, stumbling through the woods. When I stood again at the foot of the oak, a rope fell from its branches with a hook on the end. I attached the bucket and watched it hauled up into the darkness.

"You've gone and spilled most of it."

"It's dark."

"Well. You'll have to go again."

The bucket came down again and I went to refill it, trying to be careful. The face didn't reappear. I stood looking up into the oak till my neck hurt; I heard some splas.h.i.+ng and knocking but the saint didn't speak again.

In the first light of morning, when I woke stiff and chilled, and looked upward, it was all clear: what had been a ma.s.sy darkness in the tree was a little house built in the broad arms of the oak with great care, of woven branches and pieces of angel-made this and that, with small windows and a smokestack that leaned out away from the branches. A rope ran from a window to a convenient branch, and from it hung two long s.h.i.+rts.

It hadn't once occurred to me, you know, that perhaps the twins were mistaken, and their little old man wasn't a saint at all; I had just a.s.sumed that somehow they knew. And looking up now at his tree house, I had no need for doubt. It was just such houses that the saints lived in so many lives ago, when we wandered; St. Gary's great beech and the oak of St. Maureen, and the tree whose stump is still marked in Little Belaire's woods, where St. Andy went to live after St. Bea died. "Saints in the trees!" I said aloud, as old people do when something astonishes them.

Should I call out to him? I didn't know his name; and now in the daylight, despite the errand I had run for him, it was clear to me that he didn't want me there, squatting at the foot of his tree. No doubt he was sitting in his little house waiting for me to go away. In my excitement at having so soon in my journey come upon a real saint from whom I could learn, I hadn't considered his feelings in the matter at all - and I Palm cord, too! I felt a hot flush of shame, and went quietly away from his oak, though not so far that I couldn't observe him. I sat on a patch of moss there, and smoked some, and waited.

In not too long a time I saw his door open, and from it fell a rope ladder ingeniously made, and slowly but confidently the saint climbed down. He seemed to be speaking to someone not present, agreeing, disagreeing with gestures; he carried a brush and a ragged towel.

Gone for a bath. And there was the rope ladder to his house, still moving from the last step he had taken from it.

Did I dare? I would only take a brief peek while he was gone; I would go only to the top of the ladder and look in. But when I got to the doorway and looked in, I forgot that resolve and climbed inside.

And where to begin to describe what I saw once I had got myself inside! The walls of wattle were c.h.i.n.ked with mud and moss, and a big limb of the oak, running up through the house at an angle, made a low arch that divided the house in two; the floor was uneven, and stepped up and down to fit itself to the branches it was built into. The ceiling was low, and peaked at odd angles, and everywhere, hung from the ceiling, on shelves built into the wall, in cubbyholes in the corners, on tables and chests, were things I knew nothing about but knew were treasures: things angel-made, by skills long gone from the world, their purposes still potent in them if only you knew enough to discover them. There were more old mysteries and angel stuff crammed into that little house, it seemed, than in all of Belaire itself.

So absorbed was I in all this that I failed to hear the saint returning till the house creaked and moved with his climbing up the ladder. There was nowhere to hide; I picked up my pack quickly and slung it over my shoulder, just leaving, and stood fearful and embarra.s.sed as his head - at first astonished, then displeased - appeared in the doorway.

He gave his attention to getting in the door, and when he stood inside - shorter than I was - he considered me. I was too embarra.s.sed to speak. He caught a thought then, and came to me smiling, holding out his hand to me.

"Good-by," he said politely, and I shook his brown hand. He turned away then and stood in the low arch made by the limb with his back to me, waiting for me to be gone. But I couldn't bring myself to leave. His hands behind his back clasped and unclasped impatiently. Inspired, I reached into my pack and pulled out the bottle of grape soda that No Moon had given me; and when he peeked around to see if I had gone, I showed it to him, smiling, still afraid to speak. His gaze stopped on the bottle for a moment, and when he looked away he began to rock back and forth on his big boots. I waited. At last he edged away from the arch, ducked down beneath a cluttered table, and drew out an old gla.s.s, lumpy and full of bubbles. Without looking at me, he put the gla.s.s on the table, and I brought the bottle to him. He looked up then suddenly, smiling as broadly as his small face could. "My name is Blink," he said. "What's yours?"

"My name is Rush that Speaks." I put the bottle on the table, and we both watched a bit of sun from the window stab through its purple heart. St. Blink broke the seal and the bubbles crowded to the top. He poured out a foaming, hissing gla.s.sful, recapping it tight quickly to keep the bubbles in. He picked up the gla.s.s and drank two long noisy gulps. A moment later a small musical belch escaped him, and he smiled at me fondly. "Did you know," he said, sitting down slowly in a creaking chair of bent wood and rushes and turning the gla.s.s in the sun, "that in very ancient times, to keep summer fruits, they would boil them down into a thick paste, like honey, very sweet, and eat them that way?"

There was another chair there like the one he sat in, and gingerly I lowered myself into it. "No," I said, and felt a strange lump in my throat. "No, I didn't know that; but now I do."

"Yes," he said. He looked at me curiously, nodding his head and sipping his soda. I allowed my arms to rest on the arms of the chair. I knew - though I was afraid, as yet, to let myself wholly believe it - that! had come to a place I had long sought, and could stay.

Fourth Facet

And I thought, as that summer went on and I was not sent away, when I would come through the woods with water and see the tree house amid its speaking leaves, that perhaps Blink had found me just as I had found him: someone whom he had long waited for. I would smile at our luck even through the complicated task of getting myself up, and then the water up, and then the water inside and into Jug.

Jug on its table stood as high as my chin; made of plastic, bright yellow, sleek and edgeless. It had a top that fit snugly, which had once been clear but was now cloudy. Water from its little tap, though it had been standing all day, tasted as fresh and cool as though you drank it from the stream. Painted or somehow sealed on its front was a picture of a man, or a creature like a man, with thick square running legs and arms thrown wide. One fat hand held a gla.s.s from which orange liquid splashed; the other hand thrust up one clublike finger. His head, orange as the liquid in his gla.s.s, was immense for his body, a huge sphere, and bore an expression of wild glee, of unimaginable shrieking joy. That was Jug.

I asked if it was one of Blink's souvenirs from the city. He had made a trip to the city when he was young, and he would tell stories about it at night. "I took it to carry the rest of the things I found," he said, "because it was light and big. I strapped it to my shoulders." And he would tell about the silent city, more silent than anywhere, because almost nothing lived there to make noise. In ancient times there had been not only the men but the populations that lived on men, birds and rats and insects; they all disappeared when the men left. He had walked through the silence, and climbed into buildings, and took Jug to carry the things he found.

When he told stories of the city and the things he had found there, I thought Blink might be Bones cord, or even Buckle, though Buckle cord has no saints at all in it. But I wasn't satisfied with this. When I saw him with his specs on, at the table working at his crostic-words, absorbed in their mystery, and beautiful in his absorption, brus.h.i.+ng away a fly and crossing and uncrossing his big feet in perplexity, I was sure he was of St. Gene's tiny Thread cord. But still it wouldn't do.

Why didn't you ask him?

Ask him what?

What cord he was.

Well, if I didn't know, how was he to know?

But you knew what cord you were.

Yes. And if I had known St. Blink in the warren, with his friends and his occupations and the places he chose to live, I would have known what cord he was, too. Your cord, you see, isn't something you discover just by examining yourself, the way you look into a mirror and discover you have red hair. In Little Belaire, you are in a cord, and a cord is - well, a cord, like a piece of string, not like a name you bear. That makes it clearer, doesn't it?

Well. Just go on. What was it you said he was doing, so absorbed, that made you think he was Thread cord?

He was at his crostic-words.

When St. Ervin came to learn to be a saint from St. Maureen in her oak tree, he was never once allowed up into the house she had built there, never once, though he stayed for years. She would dispute with him sometimes, and tell him to go away and leave her alone; he wouldn't go, he insisted on staying, he brought presents and she threw them away, he hid and she discovered him and ran him off with a stick, well, the story is very long, but the end is that when St. Maureen was dying and St. Ervin came to her as she lay too weak to run him off, and wept that he could not now ever be a saint, she said, "Well, Ervin, that's a story; go tell that." And died.

When I had been a few days in the tree house, I told Blink, in some embarra.s.sment, why I had come, and like St. Maureen, he only said, "You want to be a saint? A saint? Then why are you here? Why don't you be about it?"

"I thought," I said, head down, "that maybe I could stay here with you, and listen and watch, and see how you became a saint, and learn to do the same."

"Me?" he squeaked in consternation. "Me? Why, I'm not a saint! Whatever could have given you that idea? Me a saint! Boy, didn't they teach you to speak truthfully in the warren? And couldn't you have heard it in all I said? Do I sound to you like St. Roy?"

"Yes," I said truthfully.

Abashed, he turned to look at his crostic-words. "No, no," he said after a little thought. "I'll tell you what. A saint will tell you stories of his life, and..."

"And so do you, about going to the city, and all the things you found there."

"There's a difference. The stories I tell are not of my life, but of our life, our life as men. It's the difference between wisdom and knowledge. I'll admit to knowledge, even to a lot of it, if it makes you happy to have found me; useless knowledge though it is. But wisdom - I'm no angel, I know this much, that wisdom need not come from knowledge, and sometimes can't at all. If it's knowledge you want, well, I haven't had anybody to tell about it for years, so I'm glad you've come; if it's wisdom, then you'd better be about it any way you can find; I'll be no help."

"Would it be possible to have knowledge and still be a saint?"

He hmmed a bit over that. "I suppose," he said; "but being a saint wouldn't have anything to do with how much knowledge you had. It would be like, you can be tall, or fat, or have blue eyes, and be a saint - you see?"

"Well," I said, relieved, "maybe then I could start with getting knowledge, and take my chances with being wise as I go along."

"It's all right with me," said my saint. "What would you like to know?"

"First of all," I said, "what is it that you're doing?"

"This? This is my crostic-words. Look."

On the table where the morning sun could light it lay a thin sheet of gla.s.s. Below it was a paper, covered minutely with what I knew was printing; this took up most of the paper, except for one block, a box divided into smaller boxes, some black and some white. On the gla.s.s that covered the paper, Blink had made tiny black marks - letters, he called them - over the white boxes. The paper was crumbled and yellow, and over a part of it a brown stain ran.

"When I was a boy in Little Belaire," he said, bending over it and brus.h.i.+ng away a spider that sat like a letter above one white box, "I found this paper in a chest of Bones cord's. n.o.body, though, could tell me what it was, what the story was. One gossip said she thought it was a puzzle, you know, like St. Gene's puzzles, but different. Another said it was a game, like Rings, but different. Now, I wouldn't say it was only for this that I left Belaire to wander, but I thought I'd find out how it was a puzzle or a game, and how to solve it or play it. And I did, mostly, though that was sixty years ago, and it's not finished yet."

He ducked his head beneath the table and searched among the belongings he kept there. "I talked with a lot of people, went a long way. The first thing I found out was that to figure out my paper I had to learn to read writing. That was good advice, but for a long time no one I met knew how to do it." He drew out a wooden box and opened it. Inside were dark, thick blocks that I had seen before. "That's Book," I said.

"Those are books," said St. Blink.

"There's a lot there," I said.

"I've been places," he said, lifting the top Book, "where books filled buildings as large almost as Little Belaire, floor to ceiling." He lifted the cover to reveal the paper sewn up inside, which released the peculiar smell of Book, musty, papery, distinct. "The book," he said slowly like a sleeptalker, drawing his finger under the largest writing, "about a thousand things." His fingers wandered over the rest of the page, while he said "something something something" under his breath, and came to rest on a line of red writing at the bottom. "Time, life, books," he said thoughtfully, and lowered the lid over it again.

"There are people," he said, tapping the gray block, "and I found some of them eventually, who spend their whole lives with this, peeking into the secrets of the angels. They're turned around, you see, and look backwards always; and though all I wanted to do was to solve my puzzle, the more I learned to read writing, the more I got turned around myself. It's endless, the angels' writing, they wrote down everything, down to the tiniest detail of how they did everything. And it's all in books to be found."

"You mean if we could read writing, we could do all those things again that they did? Fly?"

"Well. They had a phrase, they said, 'Necessity is the mother of invention'; and I can imagine that there could come a time again when some inner necessity makes us begin all that again. But I can more easily imagine that all that is done with, put away in these books, like toys that don't amuse you any longer but which are too much a part of your childhood to pitch out.

"Those old men, you know," he said, putting away all the Book and sliding it back into place under the table, "they wouldn't dream of actually trying to follow the instructions in any of the million instruction books. That it was once all like that is sufficient for them. That it could ever be like that again - well, it's like smiling over the sadnesses of your youth, and being glad they're all quite past."

He bent again over his ancient puzzle. He sighed. He wet a finger and wiped a mar on the gla.s.s. "You put letters in the boxes," he said, "according to instructions written here. But the instructions are the puzzle: they are clues only, to words which, when broken up into letters, will fill the empty boxes. When every clue has been deciphered, and the word it hints at guessed, and all the letters rearranged rightly and put in their proper boxes, the letters in the boxes will spell out a message. They will make sense as you read them across."

That may not have been exactly what he said, because I didn't ever really understand how it worked. But I understood why he had spent so many years at it: to have been hidden so well, what at last appeared in the boxes must be of vast importance. I looked down at what composed the message, filled with gaps like an old man's mouth. "What does it say?"

THERE ARE COS KS IN SAN DI O CZ RS.

OF THE STRE TS TH ALL THEMSELVES.

PR TTY NAMES LIKE TH CI IZE S COMM.

TEE BUT THEY ARE THE TIR TS.

OF EU PE SPROOT NG A N IN THE SWEWT.

SOIL OF THIS FREE LAND.

He was right, that it was a puzzle or a game; you were wrong to think it must be important, to be so well hidden. It was one of thousands like it; the angels solved them or played them in a few minutes, or an hour, and tossed them away.

Angels... If I could believe only a part of what St. Blink told me, the hundred years or so before the Storm must have been the most exciting to be alive in since there have been men. I spent a lot of time daydreaming about those times, and what it would really have been like. The stories to furnish my daydreams poured out of Blink like water; I think he had been like me when he was young, and still was in a way, though he snorted when I talked about how wonderful it must have been. "Wonderful," he said. "Do you know that one of the biggest causes of death in those days was people killing themselves?"

"How, killing themselves?"

"With weapons, like the ones I told you about; with poisons and drugs; by throwing themselves from high buildings; by employing oh any number of engines that the angels made for other reasons."

"And they did that deliberately?"

"Deliberately."

"Why?"

"For as many reasons as you have to say the time they lived in was wonderful."

Well, there was no convincing me, of course; I would still sit and dream away the hot sleepy afternoons, thinking of the angels in their final agony, their incredible dreaming restless pride that covered the world with Road and flung Little Moon out to hang in the night sky and ended forcing them to leap to their deaths from high buildings still unsatisfied (though I thought perhaps Blink was wrong, and it was only that they thought they could fly).

Oh, the world was full in those days; it seemed so much more alive than these quiet times when a new thing could take many lifetimes to finish its long birth labors and the world stay the same for generations. In those days a thousand things began and ended in a single lifetime, great forces clashed and were swallowed up in other forces riding over them. It was like some monstrous race between destruction and perfection; as soon as some piece of the world was conquered, after vast effort by millions, as when they built Road, the conquest would turn on the conquerors, as Road killed thousands in their cars; and in the same way, the mechanical dreams the angels made with great labor and inconceivable ingenuity, dreams broadcast on the air like milkweed seeds, all day long, pa.s.sing invisibly through the air, through walls, through stone walls, through the very bodies of the angels themselves as they sat to await them, and appearing then before every angel simultaneously to warn or to instruct, one dream dreamed by all so that all could act in concert, until it was discovered that the dreams pa.s.sing through their bodies were poisonous to them somehow, don't ask me how, and millions were sickening and dying young and unable to bear children, but unable to stop the dreaming even when the dreams themselves warned them that the dreams were poisoning them, unable or afraid to wake and find themselves alone, until the Long League awakened the women and the women ceased to dream: and all this happening in one man's lifetime.

And it all went faster as the Storm came on, that is the Storm coming on was the race drawing to its end; the solutions grew stranger and more desperate, and the disasters greater, and in the teeth of them the angels dreamed their wildest dreams, that we would live forever or nearly, that we would leave the earth, the spoiled earth, entirely and float in cities suspended between the earth and the moon forever, a dream they could not achieve because of the Wars starting and the millions of them falling out in a million different ways and all at each other's throats. And the Long League growing secretly everywhere as the desperate solutions fell to ruins or exploded in the faces of their makers, the Long League in secret struggle with the angels, who hardly knew of its existence in their midst till the League was the only power left when the Law and the Gummint had exhausted themselves with the Wars and in the struggle to keep the world man's; and for that matter the truthful speakers beginning the speech over the thousand phones of the Co-op Great Belaire; and while the million lights were going out, and the mechanical dreams fading and leaving the angels alone in the terrible dark, the Planters, thousand-armed and -eyed and wiser than any human being, searched other skies and suns at the angel's bidding, and brought home the trees of bread and who knows what else now lost; and n.o.body able to comprehend everything going on all at once, and no wonder either; and then the Storm, as Seven Hands said, which anybody could have seen, and it all began to stop, and kept stopping till all those millions were standing in the old woodlands which they had never been in before and looking around in wonder at the old world as though it were as strange as their dreams had truly been.

Blink said: "It was as though a great sphere of many-colored gla.s.s had been floated above the world by the unimaginable effort and power of the angels, so beautiful and strange and so needful of service to keep afloat that for them there was nothing else, and the world was forgotten by them as they watched it float. Now the sphere is gone, smashed in the Storm, and we are left with the old world as it always was, save for a few wounds that can never be healed. But littered all around this old ordinary world, scattered through the years by that smas.h.i.+ng, lost in the strangest places and put to the oddest uses, are bits and pieces of that great sphere; bits to hold up to the sun and look through and marvel at - but which can never be put back together again."

We lay stretched out in the late-summer yellow meadow and watched the solemn clouds go by. There had been a chill that dried out the woods and left them dusty and odorous, rustling and tinted brown, but summer kept on: engine summer.

"Blink," I said, "are there cities in the sky?"

He scratched behind his ear and settled back with his hands behind his head. "The angels' cities in the sky. That's what Little St. Roy called clouds like those. But there's a story. It's said that at the time of the Storm the angels built cities covered with domes of gla.s.s, which by some means could float like clouds. I don't know. I don't doubt they could. And they used to say that one day, after thousands of years perhaps, the angels would come back; the cities would land, and the angels would come out and see all that had been going on while they floated. Well. Hmmm... n.o.body, no angel's returned... I don't know... Maybe they got it mixed up with Little Moon, which really was a city in the sky where angels did live, though all there are dead now, caught in the Storm they were with no way to get home - still there, I guess. Who knows? The milkweed's breaking, see there?"

The brown seed floated near him, which looked so much like him; I thought that if I could get close enough to it, it would have a long nose, little features, like Blink's. It rolled across his wrinkled white s.h.i.+rt and got off again, going elsewhere. The air would choose.

"Bits and pieces," Blink said sleepily. "Bits and pieces."

He slept. I watched the clouds, peopling their valleys and canyons with angels.

Fifth Facet

Bits and pieces: a silver ball and glove. An angel picture of St. Gary's Uncle Plunkett. A house in which two children and an old woman told about the weather, and the stone dead men in between. A false leg; a clear sphere with nothing at all inside it except all of Dr. Boots; a fly caught in plastic; a city in the sky. No, it can't be put back together, he was right about that, and I never wanted to put it back together; but it seemed that each of these things in turn gave me a message, a sign, pointed a finger toward the next, and that somehow, at the end of the series, I would find something precious which was lost - perhaps only knowledge, but something which I wanted above all else to find.

You have found it.

Have I? Who is this I? Didn't Mongolfier tell me that it wasn't I at all that would come here, that what would come here was no more than a reflection, an unvarnished dream, no more I than the angel picture of Uncle Plunkett, made by no human hand, was Plunkett himself? Then why do you say I have found anything at all?